Mozilla Breaks Down Firefox 4 Download Stats

Posted on March 29, 2011 8:30 AM by Rob Williams

Mozilla released its Firefox 4 Web browser early last week, and the immediate response was almost overwhelming even as a spectator. If you happened to have watched the download counter at Mozilla.com, you would have seen that each refresh tacked on a thousand or more to the total, and after a mere two days, that counter sat at a very impressive 15.85 million. Whew.

To help break an impressive number like that down, Mozilla has created a poster that stylistically delivers one cool stat after another. Interestingly, Firefox 4 had more downloads on the second day, not the first. This isn’t quite what I’d expect, but I guess it proves that most people aren’t die-hard tech geeks that immediately notice when a new version of their favorite program gets released.

The peak downloads-per-minute was 10,200, and across the two-day span, there was an average of 91.7 full downloads each second. Need even more perspective? The number of downloads over those two days amounts to more than the population of Los Angeles, and is equal to the entire Internet population in 1995. That’s a lotta people.

I of course was one of these, and when I clicked “Download”, it effectively ended a nine month or so hiatus where I moved over to Google Chrome in order to experience another browser. While I do like many different things about Chrome, I ended up becoming just as annoyed with it over time as I had thought I was with Firefox. But now that I’m back with the ‘fox, I’m loving it!